2016 Beta Test Blog

Team 4153 has been chosen to be an FRC Beta test team. Here’s where we’ll keep a log of what we’re doing.

14 October 2015: Beta DVDs arrived a few days ago, installing LabVIEW right now. 5:55 pm, ended at 7:15 pm. Just watched the Teaser too.

21 October 2015: Starting a New Project on Dashboard failed. Bug report reported to FIRST about a week ago.

22 October 2015: We tested updating the roboRIO firmware and imaging it with the 2016 image. Overall, all works very well, but there are a few things worth noting:

– The first time we tried to connect the roboRIO via USB, Windows detected a device but was unable to install the driver. It turned out this was due to a bad USB cable. Not sure what was wrong with it but if you have trouble try swapping the USB cable with a new one.

– After updating your roboRIO, the mDNS address to get to the webserver is roborio-team-FRC.local instead of roborio-team.local like last year

7 November 2015: FIRST just released the new LabVIEW framework which we’re downloading and will be testing this week. The bug with the creation of a New Project has been fixed and closed.

14 November 2015: The control and command framework had a few bugs. The ones we reported have been acknowledged and should be fixed in the next release. In addition, if you want to have a quick look and get an idea of how this framework works, we posted a tutorial on NI website at: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-44963

8 January 2016: Here is a three VI example of what the command and control framework is all about: BasicCnC. The main.vi is analog to the robotmain. It regularly polls controls via the commandl.vi in the loop. In the actual robot the command.vi would be in the teleop.vi. If a button is pressed, it sends the command via a notifier to the control.vi which executes it. The command.vi execute the command and then goes to the standby state where it waits without consuming any ressorces until it receives the next command.